Song of the open road

Dan NeilTribune newspapers

The Road.

Do you hear the power of those words, all those songs pouring into your head like the dusty stream from a grain silo? Are you suddenly tangled up in blue on the lonesome highway to hell with white-line fever? Of course you are. Because life is a highway and every day is a winding road. In fact, why don't we do it in the road?

Well, we do. Americans took to the highways in record numbers over Memorial Day weekend -- according to the AAA, some 36 million traveled more than 50 miles for the holiday, defying unprecedented fuel prices (unleaded regular averaged $2.36 per gallon in Los Angeles). The summer peregrination is in full force.

And yet, The Road is disappearing. Fading from popular music is the body of imagery, the poetic conventions that evoke the Mythic American Road. Where are the songs written in the cadence of white lines and the key of singing tires, like Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again''? Where are the songs about fugitive romance, like Kris Kristofferson's ``Me and Bobby McGee''; about journeys of self-discovery, like Simon & Garfunkel's ``America''; songs of asphalt adventure (``Take It Easy,'' written by Jackson Browne, memorably recorded by the Eagles)?

These songs are part of the pop-music canon for a reason. Americans are pilgrims, historically and -- until recently, perhaps -- spiritually. From Lewis and Clark to Tod and Buzz and Thelma and Louise, movement and mobility have been framed in metaphysical terms. Life on the road is morally superior to settled domesticity.

The Road is a crossroads of self and space, where aimless wandering has a purpose and the empty horizon is full of promise. This is the big-sky universe of Whitman and Steinbeck and Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson (just don't let him drive). It's the wind-blown home of fugitive souls such as Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and countless others.

As I rolled on, the sky grew dark
I put the pedal down, to make some time
There's somethin' good, waiting down this road
I'm pickin' up whatever's mine.-- Tom Petty, "Running Down a Dream"

Songwriters and musicians have had plenty of real-life experience to draw on. "Musicians have always been the first ones to be run out of town," says T-Bone Burnett, who put together the soundtrack for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- a picaresque film loosely based on Homer's "Odyssey," which might be regarded as the original road song. "To a musician, the road is home," Burnett says.

Of course, some of the greatest road songs are not about the road at all -- any more than Kerouac's "On the Road" or the driving scenes in Nabokov's "Lolita" are about transportation infrastructure. AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" is a fist-pumping anthem of dysfunction. Aretha Franklin's "Freeway of Love" -- a song that bounces like a car on the expansion strips on California's Interstate Highway 210 -- is a classic double-entendre:

We got some places to see
I brought all the maps with me
So jump right in ... Ain't no sin
Take a ride in my machine.

It's the imagery of the road that's so appealing. And it's this very imagery that is fading away.

Take the Google onramp to the information superhighway and do a search for ``road songs.'' You will soon come across the Federal Highway Administration's road-song list. Compiled by the agency's self-appointed and -- he is anxious to emphasize -- unofficial musicologist, Richard F. Weingroff, the list comprises almost 800 songs that mention roads or highways.

When it came to picking out road songs, Weingroff had pretty high standards. ``I didn't want a lot of rock songs about the weary travel of the road,'' he says. Weingroff also brought a bureaucrat's sense of propriety. ``In a lot of songs the road is a metaphor for drinking ... and so on.''

On Weingroff's list you will find the usual suspects: the Allman Brothers' ``Ramblin' Man''; The Who's ``Going Mobile'' and the ever popular and bombastic ``Born to Be Wild'' by Steppenwolf. The pantheon of rock gods is well represented. ``At first I was just listing songs I liked,'' the fortysomething Weingroff admits sheepishly. Also included are standards such as Bobby Troup's ``Route 66.''

What's interesting in Weingroff's list is the near absence of songs from the past decade. There are a few, to be sure, such as Fastball's 1998 hit ``The Way,'' a song about the mysterious disappearance of an older couple who abandoned their kids to take a road trip. But others only prove the rule. The Stone Temple Pilots' ``Interstate Love Song'' actually creates its lovelorn landscape around the anachronistic image of train travel.

Frank X. Brusca's www.route40.net Web site has a similar compendium of road songs, helpfully organized by rubric, such as ``bus songs'' (``Promised Land'' by Chuck Berry, for instance) or ``truck songs'' (``Willin' '' by Little Feat, or the loony novelty song ``Convoy,'' by C.W. McCall). Brusca's list includes all kinds of music, from Texas swing to jazz, blues and radio rock. Yet, just as in Weingroff's list, fresh road songs are scarcer than cappuccino machines in East Texas.

Even country music has grown increasingly immobile and domestic, its imagery hemmed in by suburbia. Shania Twain's crossover monster ``Still the One'' is a far cry from Johnny Cash's peripatetic version of Hank Snow's ``I've Been Everywhere'' (``Listen! I've traveled every road in this here land!'') or Merle Haggard's ``White Line Fever'':

I wonder just what makes a man keep pushing on
What makes me keep on hummin' this old highway song
I've been from coast to coast a hundred times before
I ain't found one single place where I ain't been before.

The last Grammy-winning country song that put the road to good use was "The Highwayman" recorded in 1985 by grizzled eminences Cash, Haggard, Nelson and Kristofferson.

Regardless of the list you consult -- and there are plenty -- it seems apparent that songs of the road are running on empty.

"The romance of the car and the road is receding in the face of the world we now live in," says musician and composer Burnett. "The idea that there's this great frontier and we're going to go someplace and it's going to be better. The frontier is closed off to us now."

Ironically, when it comes to listening to music, the road never has been better. The cabin of the average compact car today is many decibels quieter than the best luxury cars of a few years ago. Carmakers have formed alliances with audiophile stereo manufacturers and the results are rolling concert halls. So why have songs run off The Road?

Perhaps because the roads themselves are less interesting. With the creation of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, the smaller, rural-threaded highways, the roads of national memory and experience, became obsolete: Highway 61, the way north for poor Southern blacks; Route 66, Steinbeck's "Mother Road," heading west toward California. Frank Lloyd Wright once said Route 66 was "a giant chute down which everything loose in this country is sliding into Southern California." These two highways have figured in scores of songs and more than a few movies.

It's a bit harder to work up a good lyric about a boring concrete flume such as the West Coast's Interstate Highway 5. However, there is a two-volume collection of songs called "The I-10 Chronicles" featuring music by vagabond souls such as Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and Warren Zevon, and spanning the road's musical geography, from country, rock, folk, conjunto and blues.

If there is one quality above all that defines a good road song, it's "longing," Burnett says. "For getting away from home, or getting to home. "This is the homesick ache in songs such as "Six Days on the Road," a gear-jamming ode to love, or Golden Earring's smoldering "Radar Love."

I've been drivin' all night my hand's wet on the wheel
There's a voice in my head that drives my heel
And my baby calls that she needs me here
It's half past four and I'm shifting gear.''
-- Golden Earring, ``Radar Love''

The flip side is wanderlust, a kind of restlessness that wakes song narrators up at night and sends them out the screen door. In Springsteen's ``Born to Run'' or James Taylor's ``Highway Song,'' adventure takes the place of security, faith supplants certainty.

The Road always has been a central feature of the American landscape, the principal metaphor that defines our experience as free people in a vast land. Yes, we are driving more but we seem to be enjoying less, if the creative impulse of our songwriters is any indication.did he talk to some young songwriters? Have we lost the longing, the over-the-horizon ambition that has defined us since Whitman's ``Song of the Open Road''?